Quotes

I absolutely love quotes and keep them up where I see them frequently. Since this is somewhere I can post as much as I want, I felt like I’d start putting them here (in addition to the few I’ve posted on Facebook). I will probably get around to organizing them in the future, but for now, I will simply list them in no particular order.

“The only way to become the best at anything is to fail. Fail as fast as you can.”

“Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other…The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.”
~ George Orwell

“Success is a lousy teacher – it seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
~ Bill Gates

“I was no party man myself, and the first wish of my heart was, if parties did exist, to reconcile them.”
~ George Washington

“Every man is entitled to his own opinion, but he is not entitled to his own facts.”

“A great idea goes through three stages on its way to acceptance: 1) it is dismissed as nonsense, 2) it is acknowledged as true, but insignificant, 3) finally, it is seen to be important, but not really anything new.”
~ William James

“The issue here is liberty, and democracy is far from a synonym for that.”
~ Perry de Havilland

“Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and so far as their fortunes may be within my control, they shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne “The Custom House”

“Ask not for a light load – ask for a strong back.”

“I desire to speak somewhere without bounds, like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments … Why lay down to our dullest perceptions always, and praise that as “common sense”?
~ Henry David Thoreau “Walden”

“The man who does not read GOOD books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
~ Mark Twain

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”
~ G.K. Chesterton

“A man’s admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him”
~ Alexis de Tocqueville

“Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.”

The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would shape human behaviour, but Christ can change human nature.
~ Ezra Taft Benson

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
~ Steven R Covey

Success in life is the result of good judgment. Good judgment is usually the result of experience. Experience is usually the result of bad judgment.
~Anthony Robbins

“Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a Great Leap Forward that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.”
~Robert Higgs

What, then, is the law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. … since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individual groups. … But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.
-Frederic Bastiat

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
―Fyodor Dostoevsky

“It is states that are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people and immeasurable destruction in the 20th century alone. Compared to that, the victims of private crimes are almost negligible.” — Hans-Hermann Hoppe

“Rights are not gifts from Government ”

“Liberty is always freedom from government”
— Ludwig von Mises

The Difference between Government & Mafia? Size.

“The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.”

~James Madison

“The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.”

~Ludwig von Mises

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy collapses over loose fiscal policy… always followed by a dictatorship.”

Welcome!

This is the family blog of Hannah, Daniel & Little Ryu Ballard – we hope to better share our lives’ happiness with our friends, family, and loved ones using this platform. Feel free to comment or send us an email to say hello! Thanks for visiting and we hope everything is going well for you, wherever life takes you!